Benny nodded and pulled out his canteen for a drink. “We’ll be careful. Besides, Tom will know that’s where we went.”
She took the last of the Greenman’s strawberries and gave Benny half of them. “I would love one of Tom’s Sunday dinners right about now. A big steak so rare it would moo when I stuck my fork in it. Spinach and sweet corn. And those honey biscuits he makes from my mom’s recipes. And one of his apple pies with raisins.”
“With raisins and walnuts,” corrected Benny. “It’s important.” They walked, thinking about a feast. “They’ll have plenty of food at the hotel.”
“If they don’t, I’m going to bite your arm off.”
The joke conjured an image of her from his dream. “Come on, Nix,” he said quickly. “We can be there in a couple of hours.”
She looked back the way they’d come. “They will find us, won’t they?”
“Sure,” he said, and for the first time today he actually meant it. “And we’ll be okay until they do.”
The fields, valleys, and meadows through which they’d walked had been clear of serious threats. They’d spotted a few zoms, but each time, Benny and Nix circled around them and kept moving. Neither of them felt any desire to attack zoms unless there was no choice. Last year, on his first trip into the Ruin, Benny and Tom had spied on a trio of bounty hunters who were beating and torturing zombies for fun. The men were laughing and having a good time; however, Benny was instantly sickened by the sight, and the memory was like an open wound in his mind.
“Let’s go,” Nix said, and they began walking again. Even though it was early April and they were in higher elevations, the sun was hot. Most of the clouds had burned off, and neither of them had a hat.
“Wow,” gasped Benny, reaching for his canteen again, “we should sit some of this out and start again when the sun’s not four inches from the top of our heads.”
“I’m for that,” Nix agreed glumly, then brightened and pointed. “Look! Apples.”
They left the road and cut through a field to an overgrown orchard. They collected an armload of apples and settled down with their backs to a bullet-pocked stone wall. The stones were cool, and the apples were sweet. There was a burned-out farmhouse nearby, and beyond that was a barn that had once been painted bright red but that fourteen years had faded to a shade of rust resembling dried blood. A line of crows stood along the peaked roof, dozing in the afternoon heat.
Benny and Nix took off their sweltering carpet coats, and both of them were soaked with sweat. Benny was so exhausted that he was almost-almost-too weary to notice how Nix’s clothes were pasted to her body. He quietly banged his head on the stone wall. Then he closed his eyes and tried counting to fifty million. Eventually he opened his eyes and busied himself slicing apples for them. After a while, Nix pulled out her journal again and started writing.
“What are you doing?” Benny asked, munching on a slice of apple.
“Making a list.”
“Of?”
“Things I don’t understand about what’s been happening.”
“That’s going to be a long list. What do you have so far?”
She chewed the end of her pencil. “Okay, I get the rhinoceros. Zoos and circuses and all. That one makes sense… but what about the guy we found tied to the truck? Who was he and why was he fed to the zoms? And by whom? And worse… why didn’t he reanimate?”
Benny glumly shook his head.
“What does it mean?” Nix asked. “What could it mean? Is the plague or radiation or whatever it is wearing off? Or are we just now discovering that some people are immune to it?”
“Wouldn’t we know that already?” Benny asked.
“With three hundred million zoms in America? How would anyone know, especially if it was rare?”
“The bounty hunters would know,” insisted Benny. “Tom would have known. He’s all over the place. He hears all sorts of stuff. If that’s been happening, then he knows about it.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding thoughtfully, “I’ll buy that… but wouldn’t that mean the other idea is more likely?”
“That whatever caused the zoms to rise in the first place might be coming to an end?” Benny thought about it. “That would be pretty amazing.”
“If it’s true…,” Nix said dubiously. “Then there’s the big weirdness at the way station. Brother David, Shanti, and Sarah missing. And all the stuff Tom sent for our road trip.”
“And the zoms,” Benny added. “Tom told me that sometimes a bunch of zoms would follow something, like a herd of wild horses or a running bear. He called it ‘flocking.’ Is that what we saw last night?”
“No way,” Nix said firmly. “Last night was no accident. It felt like a planned attack. I think someone drove them down out of the mountains like Lilah did with the zoms from the Hungry Forest.”
They ate their apples in silence for a while.
“Nix,” Benny said tentatively, “there’s… something I have to tell you. Something I didn’t want to say last night.”
“Is it about Lilah?” Nix said quickly.
He turned and looked at her.
“Lilah? What about her? Because she ran off?”
Nix colored. “No, never mind. Go ahead… what were you going to say?”
He took a breath. “Last night… when we were in the field with all those zoms? Before I started the fire? I… um… saw someone.”
“Who?”
Benny cleared his throat. “It was dark. I was scared. There were a million freaking zoms, so I can’t be sure and I’m probably wrong, but… I think I saw Charlie Pink-eye.”
She whipped around and grabbed his sleeve with her small, strong fists. She shook him. “What?”
“Whoa! Ow, you’re banging my head against the stones.”
Nix abruptly stopped shaking him, but her fists stayed knotted in his sleeve. “You saw him?”
“No, I said I wasn’t sure. The dark and the zoms and all-”
“Was he alive or a zom?”
“I… don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me, Benny Imura!”
“I’m not-I don’t know. It was just a second. I-I think he might have been alive, but the zoms weren’t attacking him.”
“He could have had cadaverine on, Benny, just like we did.”
“I know. But something wasn’t right about it. It might not even have been him.”
Nix stared into his eyes for a long time and then let him go with a little push. She suddenly got up and walked a dozen paces away, her arms wrapped tightly around her chest as if she stood in a cold wind. Benny got up more slowly but stayed by the wall.
He watched her as she worked it through. Every angle of her body seemed jagged and sharp, her posture charged with tension. Benny could only imagine what horrors were playing out in Nix’s mind. The man who had beaten and murdered her mother and then kidnapped her. The thought that somehow Charlie had orchestrated the zombie assault on the way station was horrible. It also made a queer kind of sense, since a swarm of zombies had been used to destroy Charlie’s team. An eye for an eye?
“Nix?”
She ignored him, standing stiff and trembling under the unrelenting sun. Benny waited for her. Three minutes passed. Four. Five. Gradually, by slow and painful degrees, the harsh lines of tension drained from Nix’s shoulders and back. When she turned around, Benny could see unshed tears in the corners of her eyes. She looked at him blankly for a moment, and then her eyes snapped wide.
She screamed.
Her warning was a half second too late, as cold hands clamped onto Benny from behind and dragged him backward over the stone wall. Benny twisted wildly around and saw the face of the zom who had him. A tall, thin man dressed in a tunic that looked like it had been made from an old bedsheet.
“No!” Benny cried.
It was Brother David.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Notes from Mrs. Griswold’s science lecture on how cadaverine is made: